Boy Erased, based on Garrard Conley's 2016 memoir about his time in conversion therapy at the insistence of his religious parents, has been brought to the screen by producer, director, writer and actor Joel Edgerton, who has given the book an empathetic, sobering, unimaginative yet affecting adaptation that rises above its shortcomings to pack an emotional punch.

Coming after the release of the gutsier The Miseducation of Cameron Post, whose protagonist and director are female, Boy Erased can't help but feel decidedly more conventional, focusing on the story of an attractive white male who endures a stint at Love in Action just long enough to discover it's a harmful fraud, and who is immediately delivered from its clutches — the end.